Reigning in Readability’s Multi-Page Stitching

Readability’s new multi-page integration feature is great for reading articles that are split into a few pages. However, in some cases I still prefer not to load any additional pages of text. For instance, online ePub readers such as Bookworm, the open source predecessor to Ibis Reader, present one book chapter per page. The chapters are sequentially linked in a way recognized by Readability, so an entire novel could be loaded and displayed if you invoke Readability to view one chapter!

As it turns out, an internal maxPages variable limits how many pages Readability will load. By default, it is set to 30. However, as I suggest, a small addition to the main Readability script will allow this limit to be set by the user via an extra bookmarklet parameter.

If you want to experiment with this yourself, you can modify your Readability (or McReadability) bookmarklet such that _readability_script.src points to the following copy of the script: http://anoved.net/js/readability.js (I’m not going to provide an easy link because I’m wary of using up too much of my low-rent bandwidth). Also add readMaxPages to the list of parameters in your bookmarklet; use readMaxPages=1; to prevent loading any text not on the current page (a link to the next page found, if any, will still be appended).

Posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2010. Tags: code, javascript, readability.